mills

Franz Kafka, to Oskar Baum. Kafka doesn’t mean that Kierkegaard illuminates a Christian world which is alien to his Judiasm; he elsewhere wrote that Kierkegaard “is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.”

Indeed, Kafka’s Judiasm had as its greatest effect his preoccupation with gnosis and textual indeterminacy, with an endless exegetical pursuit of truth long since vanished from the word and the world. To a lesser extent, it provided an atmosphere and some iconography for his mind, and no German-speaking Jewish man living in Prague in the early 20th century could escape the relentless othering that so dislocated and alienated him.

But reductive analyses fail clumsily with Kafka, who was a modernist writer more than a Jew or a neurotic or a Czech or a European or a mystic. It is in his modernism, which we largely share -post merely being a prefix- that we find what put the Kierkegaardian territory “almost” beyond reach:

For Kierkegaard the absurd -the suprarational- remained an alternative to the world of reductive, superficial reason; for Kafka, the absurd -the irrational- had become the world of superficial contemporaneity. What was transcendence for Kierkegaard was, in distorted form, a reality for Kafka: the senseless world of anti-rational, post-human social derangement.

The territory of religious commitment as a turning-against-the-world was almost inaccessible to Kafka, who saw the world turning against itself; Kierkegaard drew inspiration from Abraham’s irrational willingness to murder his son, while Kafka saw that soon, functionaries would commit atrocities by the millions without asking for a rationale.

This is why Kierkegaard is timeless -Wittgenstein said: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” Kafka, on the other hand, wasn’t a saint but a prophet: he saw as early as anyone what modernism meant: reason run amok and no solace beyond reason, no leap permitted.

(Note: the awesome Greg Brown and I have been arguing over whether fiction or non-fiction is superior, is more real, in Meaghano’s comments; I think Kafka’s prescience is a good example of why the novel will always illuminate more than the essay: we must imagine before we describe).

George Steiner, via New English Review. Matt Langer has posted many excellent quotes recently, too many to reblog. Regarding the above: one needs only investigate the catastrophic domestic and romantic lives of Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche to substantiate the thesis.

(Note: my own pitiful domestic and romantic life has less to do with philosophy as an “unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession” than with ordinary weirdness. However, the fact that “the body is an enemy to absolute logic or metaphysical speculation” is indeed related to what an awkward male I can be).

Ralph Waldo Emerson (via minuswell, who probably likes this for the same reason I do).

Nietzsche tried hard to communicate why systematization of thought was detrimental to philosophical integrity. Look no further than Hegel, whose system is complete enough to swallow the whole universe of inquiry but leaves man shivering and alone, waiting for the Existentialists’ rescue.

Systematization of thought, the imposition of consistency and the extension of ideas to their limits, is an urge we all have; it’s particularly destructive politically, in governmental and private organizations. The application of Marxism to art and music, or the manner in which companies begin to stupidly force the latest business-speak stratagem from their CEO on the most minute details of their operations, exemplify this.

We all like to logically abstract our principles and then instantiate them in the areas of our lives; we seek consistency, formality, codification, standardization, and the smooth, clean system of the purely logical world. We subordinate reality to this vision: everything we see reminds us of our favorite candidate’s ideas, our favorite author’s theses.

The flaw inherent in seeking consistency or systematization is that you place a higher value on those qualities than on the inherent properties of whatever you’re systematizing. If we are trying to construct HR policy that is “fair and just,” but begin to overly standardize its processes and remove autonomy from managers, we have have reduced its fairness and justice in the interest of consistency.

The search for a truly full system in any field or endeavor, one both complete and coherent, was dealt a blow first by Wittgenstein and then by physicists, but it persists. It persists despite the fact that we all know what works: inconsistency, decentralization, flexibility, local implementation of ideas and communities, policies at the individual level, and so on. It’s why we want to work for start-ups and not monoliths.

But still, every damn day in meetings, I hear, “Well, we have to be consistent.” No, we don’t.

(Note: it is important to observe the word “foolish” in the quote; not all consistency is foolish, of course).